VOLUME I.

October~March, 1912-13

Harriet Monroe ~ Editor

Reprinted with the permission
of the original publisher.

A. M. S. REPRINT CO.
New York, New York

Copyright
By Harriet Monroe
1912-1913

	Vol. I No. 1
OCTOBER, 1912
————

[Pg 1]

POETRY
I

It is a little isle amid bleak seas—
An isolate realm of garden, circled round
By importunity of stress and sound,
Devoid of empery to master these.
At most, the memory of its streams and bees,
Borne to the toiling mariner outward-bound,
Recalls his soul to that delightful ground;
But serves no beacon toward his destinies.

It is a refuge from the stormy days,
Breathing the peace of a remoter world
Where beauty, like the musing dusk of even,
Enfolds the spirit in its silver haze;
While far away, with glittering banners furled,
The west lights fade, and stars come out in heaven.

[Pg 3]

[Pg 7]

[Pg 8]

[Pg 9]

[Pg 10]

[Pg 11]

[Pg 12]

[Pg 19]

EDITORIAL COMMENT

AS IT WAS

Once upon a time, when man was
new in the woods of the world, when his feet were
scarred with jungle thorns and his hands
were red with the blood of beasts, a great
king rose who gathered his neighbors together,
and subdued the wandering tribes. Strange cunning
was his, for he ground the stones to an edge together,
and bound them with thongs to sticks; and he taught his
people to pry apart the forest, and beat back the ravenous
beasts. And he bade them honeycomb the mountainside
with caves, to dwell therein with their women. And
the most beautiful women the king took for his own,
that his wisdom might not perish from the earth. And
he led the young men to war and conquered all the warring
tribes from the mountains to the sea. And when fire
smote a great tree out of heaven, and raged through the
forest till the third sun, he seized a burning brand and
lit an altar to his god. And there, beside the ever-burning
fire, he sat and made laws and did justice. And
his people loved and feared him.

And the king grew old. And for seven journeys of
the sun from morn to morn he moved not, neither uttered
word. And the hearts of the people were troubled,
but none dared speak to the king’s despair; neither wise
men nor warriors dared cry out unto him.

[Pg 20]

Now the youngest son of the king was a lad still soft
of flesh, who had never run to battle not sat in council
nor stood before the king. And his heart yearned for
his father, and he bowed before his mother and said,
“Give me thy blessing, for I have words within me for
the king; yea, as the sea sings to the night with waves
will my words roll in singing unto his grief.” And his
mother said, “Go, my son; for thou hast words of power
and soothing, and the king shall be healed.”

So the youth went forth and bowed him toward the
king’s seat. And the wise men and warriors laid hands
upon him, and said, “Who art thou, that thou shouldst
go in ahead of us to him who sitteth in darkness?” And
the king’s son rose, and stretched forth his arms, and said,
“Unhand me and let me go, ye silent ones, who for seven
sun-journeys have watched in darkness and uttered no
word of light! Unhand me, for as a fig-tree with fruit,
so my heart is rich with words for the king.”

Then he put forth his strength and strode on singing
softly, and bowed him before the king. And he spake
the king’s great deeds in cunning words—his wars and
city-carvings and wise laws, his dominion over men and
beasts and the thick woods of the earth; his greeting of
the gods with fire.

[Pg 21]

And lo, the king lifted up his head and stretched forth
his arms and wept. “Yea, all these things have I done,”
he said, “and they shall perish with me. My death is
upon me, and I shall die, and the tribes I have welded
together shall be broken apart, and the beasts shall win
back their domain, and the green jungle shall overgrow
my mansions. Lo, the fire shall go out on the altar of the
gods, and my glory shall be as a crimson cloud that the
night swallows up in darkness.”

Then the young man lifted up his voice and cried:
“Oh, king, be comforted! Thy deeds shall not pass as
a cloud, neither shall thy laws be strewn before the wind.
For I will carve thy glory in rich and rounded words—yea,
I will string thy deeds together in jewelled beads of
perfect words that thy sons shall wear on their hearts
forever.”

“Verily thy words are rich with song,” said the king;
“but thou shalt die, and who will utter them? Like
twinkling foam is the speech of man’s mouth; like foam
from a curling wave that vanishes in the sun.”

“Nay, let thy heart believe me, oh king my father,”
said the youth. “For the words of my mouth shall keep
step with the ripple of waves and the beating of wings;
yea, they shall mount with the huge paces of the sun in
heaven, that cease not for my ceasing. Men shall sound
them on suckling tongues still soft with milk, they shall
run into battle to the tune of thy deeds, and kindle their
fire with the breath of thy wisdom. And thy glory
shall be ever living, as a jewel of jasper from the earth—yea,
as the green jewel of jasper carven into a god for
the rod of thy power, oh king, and of the power of thy
sons forever.”

[Pg 22]

The king sat silent till the going-down of the sun.
Then lifted he his head, and stroked his beard, and spake:
“Verily the sun goes down, and my beard shines whiter
than his, and I shall die. Now therefore stand at my
right hand, O son of my wise years, child of my dreams.
Stand at my right hand, and fit thy speech to music, that
men may hold in their hearts thy rounded words. Forever
shalt thou keep thy place, and utter thy true tale
in the ears of the race. And woe be unto them that
hear thee not! Verily that generation shall pass as
a cloud, and its glory shall be as a tree that withers. For
thou alone shalt win the flying hours to thee, and keep the
beauty of them for the joy of men forever.”

H. M.

ON THE READING OF POETRY

In the brilliant pages of his essay on Jean François
Millet, Romain Rolland says that Millet, as a boy, used
to read the Bucolics and the Georgics “with enchantment”
and was “seized by emotion—when he came to the
line, ‘It is the hour when the great shadows seek the
plain.’

[Pg 23]

To the lover and student of poetry, this incident has
an especial charm and significance. There is something
fine in the quick sympathy of an artist in one kind, for
beauty expressed by the master of another medium.
The glimpse M. Rolland gives us of one of the most
passionate art-students the world has ever known, implies
with fresh grace a truth Anglo-Saxons are always forgetting—that
poetry is one of the great humanities, that
poetry is one of the great arts of expression.

Many of our customs conspire to cause, almost to
force, this forgetting. Thousands of us have been educated
to a dark and often permanent ignorance of classic
poetry, by being taught in childhood to regard it as
written for the purpose of illustrating Hadley’s Latin, or
Goodwin’s Greek grammar, and composed to follow the
rules of versification at the end of the book. It seems
indeed one of fate’s strangest ironies that the efforts of
these distinguished grammarians to unveil immortal
masterpieces are commonly used in schools and colleges
to enshroud, not to say swaddle up, the images of the
gods “forever young,” and turn them into mummies. In
our own country, far from perceiving in Vergil’s quiet
music the magnificent gesture of nature that thrilled his
Norman reader—far from conceiving of epic poetry as
the simplest universal tongue, one early acquires a wary
distrust of it as something one must constantly labor
over.

[Pg 24]

Aside from gaining in childhood this strong, practical
objection to famous poetry, people achieve the
deadly habit of reading metrical lines unimaginatively.
After forming—generally in preparation for entering one
of our great universities—the habit of blinding the inner
eye, deafening the inner ear, and dropping into a species
of mental coma before a page of short lines, it is difficult
for educated persons to read poetry with what is known
as “ordinary human intelligence.”

It does not occur to them simply to listen to the
nightingale. But poetry, I believe, never speaks her
beauty—certainly never her scope and variety, except on
the condition that in her presence one sits down quietly
with folded hands, and truly listens to her singing voice.

Many people do not like poetry, in this way, as a
living art to be enjoyed, but rather as an exact science to
be approved. To them poetry may concern herself only
with a limited number of subjects to be presented in a
predetermined and conventional manner and form. To
such readers the word “form” means usually only a repeated
literary effect: and they do not understand that
every “form” was in its first and best use an originality,
employed not for the purpose of following any rule, but
because it said truly what the artist wished to express.
I suppose much of the monotony of subject and treatment
observable in modern verse is due to this belief that
poetry is merely a fixed way of repeating certain meritorious
though highly familiar concepts of existence—and
not in the least the infinite music of words meant to
speak the little and the great tongues of the earth.

[Pg 25]

It is exhilarating to read the pages of Pope and of
Byron, whether you agree with them or not, because here
poetry does speak the little and the great tongues of the
earth, and sings satires, pastorals and lampoons, literary
and dramatic criticism, all manner of fun and sparkling
prettiness, sweeping judgments, nice discriminations,
fashions, politics, the ways of gentle and simple—love
and desire and pain and sorrow, and anguish and death.

The impulse which inspired, and the appreciation
which endowed this magazine, has been a generous sympathy
with poetry as an art. The existence of a gallery
for poems and verse has an especially attractive social
value in its power of recalling or creating the beautiful
and clarifying pleasure of truly reading poetry in its
broad scope and rich variety. The hospitality of this hall
will have been a genuine source of happiness if somehow
it tells the visitors, either while they are here, or after they
have gone to other places, what a delight it is to enjoy a
poem, to realize it, to live in the vivid dream it evokes, to
hark to its music, to listen to the special magic grace of its
own style and composition, and to know that this special
grace will say as deeply as some revealing hour with
a friend one loves, something nothing else can say—something
which is life itself sung in free sympathy beyond the
bars of time and space.

E. W.

[Pg 26]

THE MOTIVE OF THE MAGAZINE

In the huge democracy of our age no interest is too
slight to have an organ. Every sport, every little industry
requires its own corner, its own voice, that it may find
its friends, greet them, welcome them.

The arts especially have need of each an entrenched
place, a voice of power, if they are to do their work and be
heard. For as the world grows greater day by day, as every
member of it, through something he buys or knows or
loves, reaches out to the ends of the earth, things precious
to the race, things rare and delicate, may be overpowered,
lost in the criss-cross of modern currents, the confusion
of modern immensities.

Painting, sculpture, music are housed in palaces in the
great cities of the world; and every week or two a new
periodical is born to speak for one or the other of them,
and tenderly nursed at some guardian’s expense. Architecture,
responding to commercial and social demands, is
whipped into shape by the rough and tumble of life
and fostered, willy-nilly, by men’s material needs. Poetry
alone, of all the fine arts, has been left to shift for herself
in a world unaware of its immediate and desperate need
of her, a world whose great deeds, whose triumphs over
matter, over the wilderness, over racial enmities and
distances, require her ever-living voice to give them glory
and glamour.

[Pg 27]

Poetry has been left to herself and blamed for inefficiency,
a process as unreasonable as blaming the desert for
barrenness. This art, like every other, is not a miracle
of direct creation, but a reciprocal relation between the
artist and his public. The people must do their part if
the poet is to tell their story to the future; they must cultivate
and irrigate the soil if the desert is to blossom as
the rose.

The present venture is a modest effort to give to
poetry her own place, her own voice. The popular
magazines can afford her but scant courtesy—a Cinderella
corner in the ashes—because they seek a large public
which is not hers, a public which buys them not for their
verse but for their stories, pictures, journalism, rarely for
their literature, even in prose. Most magazine editors
say that there is no public for poetry in America; one
of them wrote to a young poet that the verse his monthly
accepted “must appeal to the barber’s wife of the Middle
West,” and others prove their distrust by printing less
verse from year to year, and that rarely beyond page-end
length and importance.

We believe that there is a public for poetry, that it will
grow, and that as it becomes more numerous and appreciative
the work produced in this art will grow in power,
in beauty, in significance. In this belief we have been
encouraged by the generous enthusiasm of many subscribers
to our fund, by the sympathy of other lovers
of the art, and by the quick response of many prominent
poets, both American and English, who have sent or
promised contributions.

[Pg 28]

We hope to publish in Poetry some of the best work now
being done in English verse. Within space limitations
set at present by the small size of our monthly sheaf, we
shall be able to print poems longer, and of more intimate
and serious character, than the popular magazines can
afford to use. The test, limited by ever-fallible human
judgment, is to be quality alone; all forms, whether
narrative, dramatic or lyric, will be acceptable. We hope
to offer our subscribers a place of refuge, a green isle
in the sea, where Beauty may plant her gardens, and
Truth, austere revealer of joy and sorrow, of hidden
delights and despairs, may follow her brave quest
unafraid.

[Pg 29]

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

In order that the experiment of a magazine
of verse may have a fair trial, over one hundred subscriptions of
fifty dollars annually for five years have been promised
by the ladies and gentlemen listed below. In addition,
nearly twenty direct contributions of smaller sums have
been sent or promised. To all these lovers of the art the
editors would express their grateful appreciation.

Through the generosity of five gentlemen, Poetry
will give two hundred and fifty dollars in one or two
prizes for the best poem or poems printed in its pages
the first year. In addition a subscriber to the fund offers
twenty-five dollars for the best epigram.

Mr. Maurice Browne, director of the Chicago Little
Theatre, offers to produce, during the season of 1913-14,
the best play in verse published in, or submitted to,
Poetry during its first year; provided that it may be
adequately presented under the requirements and limitations
of his stage.

We are fortunate in being able, through the courtesy
of the Houghton-Mifflin Co., to offer our readers a
poem, hitherto unprinted, from advance sheets of the
complete works of the late William Vaughan Moody,
which will be published in November. The lamentable
[Pg 31]
death of this poet two years ago in the early prime of
his great powers was a calamity to literature. It is
fitting that the first number of a magazine published
in the city where for years he wrote and taught, should
contain an important poem from his hand.

Mr. Ezra Pound, the young Philadelphia poet whose
recent distinguished success in London led to wide recognition
in his own country, authorizes the statement
that at present such of his poetic work as receives
magazine publication in America will appear exclusively
in Poetry. That discriminating London publisher,
Mr. Elkin Mathews, “discovered” this young poet
from over seas, and published “Personae,” “Exultations”
and “Canzoniere,” three small volumes of verse from
which a selection has been reprinted by the Houghton-Mifflin
Co. under the title “Provença.” Mr. Pound’s
latest work is a translation from the Italian of “Sonnets
and Ballate,” by Guido Cavalcanti.

Mr. Arthur Davison Ficke, another contributor, is a
graduate of Harvard, who studied law and entered his
father’s office in Davenport, Iowa. He is the author of
“The Happy Princess” and “The Breaking of Bonds,”
and a contributor to leading magazines. An early number
of Poetry will be devoted exclusively to Mr. Ficke’s
work.

Mrs. Roscoe P. Conkling is a resident of the state
of New York; a young poet who has contributed to
various magazines.

[Pg 32]

Miss Lorimer is a young English poet resident in
Oxford, who will publish her first volume this autumn.
The London Poetry Review, in its August number, introduced
her with a group of lyrics which were criticized
with some asperity in the New Age and praised with
equal warmth in other periodicals.

Miss Dudley, who is a Chicagoan born and bred,
is still younger in the art, “To One Unknown” being the
first of her poems to be printed.

Poetry will acknowledge the receipt of
books of verse and works relating to the subject, and will print brief
reviews of those which seem for any reason significant.
It will endeavor also to keep its readers informed of the
progress of the art throughout the English-speaking
world and continental Europe. The American metropolitan
newspaper prints cable dispatches about post-impressionists,
futurists, secessionists and other radicals
in painting, sculpture and music, but so far as its editors
and readers are concerned, French poetry might have
died with Victor Hugo, and English with Tennyson, or
at most Swinburne.

Note.—Eight
months after the first general newspaper
announcement of our efforts to secure a fund for a magazine of verse,
and three or four months after our first use of the title
Poetry, a Boston firm of publishers announced a forthcoming
periodical of the same kind, to be issued under the same name.
The two are not to be confused.

THE RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR COMPANY
PRINTERS  CHICAGO

[Pg 33]

	Vol. I No. 2
NOVEMBER, 1912
————

THE PIPER

George Borrow in his Lavengro
Tells us of a Welshman, who
By some excess of mother-wit
Framed a harp and played on it,
Built a ship and sailed to sea,
And steered it home to melody
Of his own making. I, indeed,
Might write for Everyman to read
A thaumalogue of wonderment
More wonderful, but rest content
With celebrating one I knew
Who built his pipes, and played them, too:
No more.
Ah, played! Therein is all:
The hounded thing, the hunter’s call;
The shudder, when the quarry’s breath
Is drowned in blood and stilled in death;
[Pg 34]
The marriage dance, the pulsing vein,
The kiss that must be given again;
The hope that Ireland, like a rose,
Sees shining thro’ her tale of woes;
The battle lost, the long lament
For blood and spirit vainly spent;
And so on, thro’ the varying scale
Of passion that the western Gael
Knows, and by miracle of art
Draws to the chanter from the heart
Like water from a hidden spring,
To leap or murmur, weep or sing.

I see him now, a little man
In proper black, whey-bearded, wan,
With eyes that scan the eastern hills
Thro’ thick, gold-rimmèd spectacles.
His hand is on the chanter. Lo,
The hidden spring begins to flow
In waves of magic. (He is dead
These seven years, but bend your head
And listen.) Rising from the clay
The Master plays The Ring of Day.
It mounts and falls and floats away
Over the sky-line … then is gone
Into the silence of the dawn!

Joseph Campbell
[Pg 35]

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AND COMMENTS

MOODY’S POEMS

The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn
Moody will soon be published in two
volumes by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. Our
present interest is in the volume of poems,
which are themselves an absorbing drama.
Moody had a slowly maturing mind; the vague vastness
of his young dreams yielded slowly to a man’s more
definite vision of the spiritual magnificence of life. When
he died at two-score years, he was just beginning to
think his problem through, to reconcile, after the manner
of the great poets of the earth, the world with God.
Apparently the unwritten poems cancelled by death
would have rounded out, in art of an austere perfection,
the record of that reconciliation, for nowhere do we feel
this passion of high serenity so strongly as in the first
act of an uncompleted drama, The Death of Eve.

Great-minded youth must dream, and modern dreams
of the meaning of life lack the props and pillars of the
old dogmatism. Vagueness, confusion and despair are
a natural inference from the seeming chaos of evil and
good, of pain and joy. Moody from the beginning took
the whole scheme of things for his province, as a truly
heroic poet should; there are always large spaces on his
[Pg 55]
canvas. In his earlier poetry, both the symbolic Masque
of Judgment and the shorter poems derived from present-day
subjects, we find him picturing the confusion, stating
the case, so to speak, against God. Somewhat in the
terms of modern science is his statement—the universe
plunging on toward its doom of darkness and lifelessness,
divine fervor of creation lapsing, divine fervor of love
doubting, despairing of the life it made, sweeping all
away with a vast inscrutable gesture.

This seems to be the mood of the Masque of Judgment,
a mood against which that very human archangel,
Raphael, protests in most appealing lines. The poet
broods over the earth—

with all its passionate pageantry of life and love. Like
his own angel he is

The lamps are spent at the end of judgment day,

This conflict between love and doubt is the motive
also of Gloucester Moors, The Daguerreotype,
Old Pourquoi—those three noblest, perhaps, of the present-day
poems—also of The Brute and The Menagerie, and of that
fine poem manqué, the Ode in Time of Hesitation. The
Fie-Bringer is an effort at another theme—redemption,
light after darkness. But it is not so spontaneous as
the Masque; though simpler, clearer, more dramatic in
[Pg 56]
form, it is more deliberate and intellectual, and not so
star-lit with memorable lines. The Fire-Bringer is an
expression of aspiration; the poet longs for light, demands
it, will wrest it from God’s right hand like Prometheus.
But his triumph is still theory, not experience. The
reader is hardly yet convinced.

If one feels a grander motive in such poems as the
one-act Death of Eve and The Fountain, or the less
perfectly achieved I Am the Woman, it is not because of the
tales they tell but because of the spirit of faith that is
in them—a spirit intangible, indefinable, but indomitable
and triumphant. At last, we feel, this poet, already
under the shadow of death, sees a terrible splendid sunrise,
and offers us the glory of it in his art.

The Fountain is a truly magnificent expression of
spiritual triumph in failure, and incidentally of the
grandeur of Arizona, that tragic wonderland of ancient
and future gods. Those Spanish wanderers, dying in the
desert, in whose half-madness dreams and realities
mingle, assume in those stark spaces the stature of
universal humanity, contending to the last against
relentless fate. In the two versions of The Death of Eve,
both narrative and dramatic, one feels also this wild,
fierce triumph, this faith in the glory of life. Especially
in the dramatic fragment, by its sureness of touch and
simple austerity of form, and by the majesty of its figure
of the aged Eve, Moody’s art reached its most heroic
height. We have here the beginning of great things.

[Pg 57]

The spirit of this poet may be commended to those
facile bards who lift up their voices between the feast
and the cigars, whose muses dance to every vague emotion
and strike their flimsy lutes for every light-o’-love.
Here was one who went to his desk as to an altar, resolved
that the fire he lit, the sacrifice he offered, should be
perfect and complete. He would burn out his heart like
a taper that the world might possess a living light. He
would tell once more the grandeur of life; he would sing
the immortal song.

That such devotion is easy of attainment in this
clamorous age who can believe? Poetry like some of
Moody’s, poetry of a high structural simplicity, strict
and bare in form, pure and austere in ornament, implies
a grappling with giants and wrestling with angels; it is
not to be achieved without deep living and high thinking,
without intense persistent intellectual and spiritual
struggle.

H. M.

BOHEMIAN POETRY

An Anthology of Modern Bohemian Poetry, translated by P. Selver (Henry J. Drane, London).

This is a good anthology of modern Bohemian poetry,
accurately translated into bad and sometimes even
ridiculous English. Great credit is due the young translator
for his care in research and selection. The faults
of his style, though deplorable, are not such as to obscure
the force and beauty of his originals.
[Pg 58]

One is glad to be thus thoroughly assured that
contemporary Bohemia has a literature in verse, sensitive
to the outer world and yet national. Mr. Selver’s
greatest revelation is Petr Bezruc, poet of the mines.

The poetry of Brezina, Sova and Vrchlicky is interesting,
but Bezruc’s Songs of Silesia have the strength
of a voice coming de profundis.

That is the temper of it. Palaces grow by the Danube
nourished by his blood. He goes from labor to labor,
he rebels, he hears a voice mocking:

And in another powerful invective:

He thanks God he is not in the place of the oppressor, and ends:

[Pg 59]

This poet is distinctly worth knowing. He is the
truth where our “red-bloods” and magazine socialists
are usually a rather boresome pose.

As Mr. Selver has tried to make his anthology representative
of all the qualities and tendencies of contemporary
Bohemian work it is not to be supposed that
they are all of the mettle of Bezruc.

One hears with deep regret that Vrchlicky is just
dead, after a life of unceasing activity. He has been a
prime mover in the revival of the Czech nationality and
literature. He has given them, besides his own work, an
almost unbelievable number of translations from the
foreign classics, Dante, Schiller, Leopardi. For the rest
I must refer the reader to Mr. Selver’s introduction.

Ezra Pound

“THE MUSIC OF THE HUMAN HEART”

This title-phrase has not been plucked from the
spacious lawn of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. It grew
in the agreeable midland yard of Mr. Walt Mason’s
newspaper verse, and appeared in a tribute of his to Mr.
James Whitcomb Riley, whose fifty-ninth birthday
anniversary, falling on the seventh of October, has
been widely celebrated in the American public libraries
and daily press.
[Pg 60]

Mr. Riley’s fine gift to his public, the special happiness
his genius brings to his readers, cannot, for lack of space,
be adequately described, or even indicated, here. Perhaps
a true, if incomplete, impression of the beauty of
his service may be conveyed by repeating a well-known
passage of Mr. Lowes Dickinson’s Letters from John
Chinaman—a passage which I can never read without
thinking very gratefully of James Whitcomb Riley, and
of what his art has done for American poetry-readers.

Mr. Dickinson says:—

In China our poets and literary men have taught their successors
for long generations, to look for good not in wealth, not in power, not
in miscellaneous activity, but in a trained, a choice, an exquisite
appreciation of the most simple and universal relations of life. To
feel, and in order to feel, to express, or at least to understand the
expression, of all that is lovely in nature, of all that is poignant and
sensitive in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end…. The pathos
of life and death, the long embrace, the hand stretched out in vain,
the moment that glides forever away, with its freight of music and
light, into the shadow and bush of the haunted past, all that we have,
all that eludes us, a bird on the wing, a perfume escaped on the gale—
to all these things we are trained to respond, and the response is what
we call literature.

Among Mr. Riley’s many distinguished faculties of
execution in expressing, in stimulating, “an exquisite
appreciation of the most simple and universal relations
of life,” one faculty has been, in so far as I know, very
little mentioned—I mean his mastery in creating character.
Mr. Riley has expressed, has incarnated in the
melodies and harmonies of his poems, not merely several
[Pg 61]
living, breathing human creatures as they are made by
their destinies, but a whole world of his own, a vivid
world of country-roads, and country-town streets,
peopled with farmers and tramps and step-mothers and
children, trailing clouds of glory even when they boast
of the superiorities of “Renselaer,” a world of hardworking
women and hard-luck men, and poverty and
prosperity, and drunkards and raccoons and dogs and
grandmothers and lovers. To have presented through
the medium of rhythmic chronicle, a world so sharply
limned, so funny, so tragic, so mean, so noble, seems to
us in itself a striking achievement in the craft of verse.

No mere word of criticism can of course evoke,
at all as example can, Mr. Riley’s genius of identification with
varied human experiences, the remarkable concentration
and lyric skill of his characterization. Here are two poems
of his on the same general theme—grief in the presence
of death. We may well speak our pride in the wonderful
range of inspiration and the poetic endowment which
can create on the same subject musical stories of the
soul as diverse, as searching, as fresh and true, as the
beloved poems of Bereaved and His Mother.

THE OPEN DOOR

Fears have been expressed by a number of friendly
critics that Poetry may become a house of refuge for
minor poets.

[Pg 63]

The phrase is somewhat worn. Paragraphers have
done their worst for the minor poet, while they have
allowed the minor painter, sculptor, actor—worst of all,
architect—to go scot-free. The world which laughs at
the experimenter in verse, walks negligently through our
streets, and goes seriously, even reverently, to the annual
exhibitions in our cities, examining hundreds of pictures
and statues without expecting even the prize-winners to
be masterpieces.

During the past year a score or more of cash prizes,
ranging from one hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, were
awarded in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Washington, New York
and Boston for minor works of modern art. No word of
superlative praise has been uttered for one of them:
the first prize-winner in Pittsburgh was a delicately
pretty picture by a second-rate Englishman; in Chicago
it was a clever landscape by a promising young American.
If a single prize-winner in the entire list, many of which
were bought at high prices by public museums, was a
masterpiece, no critic has yet dared to say so.

In fact, such a word would be presumptuous, since
no contemporary can utter the final verdict. Our solicitous
critics should remember that Coleridge, Shelley, Keats,
Burns, were minor poets to the subjects of King George
the Fourth, Poe and Whitman to the subjects of King
Longfellow. Moreover, we might remind them that
Drayton, Lovelace, Herrick, and many another delicate
lyrist of the anthologies, whose perfect songs show
singular tenacity of life, remain minor poets through the
slightness of their motive; they created little masterpieces,
not great ones.

[Pg 64]

The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may
the great poet we are looking for never find it shut,
or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the
editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any
single class or school. They desire to print the best
English verse which is being written today, regardless
of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is
written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its
editorial comments to one set of opinions. Without
muzzles and braces this is manifestly impossible unless
all the critical articles are written by one person.

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Mr. Ezra Pound has consented to act as foreign
correspondent of Poetry, keeping its readers informed
of the present interests of the art in England, France
and elsewhere.

The response of poets on both sides of the Atlantic
has been most encouraging, so that the quality of the
next few numbers is assured. One of our most important
contributions is Mr. John G. Neihardt’s brief recently
finished tragedy, The Death of Agrippina, to which an
entire number will be devoted within a few months.

[Pg 65]

Mr. Joseph Campbell is one of the younger poets
closely associated with the renaissance of art and letters
in Ireland. His first book of poems was The Gilly of
Christ; a later volume including these is The Mountainy
Singer (Maunsel & Co.).

Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, the New York poet and
magazine editor, has published three volumes of verse,
The Quiet Singer (Rickey), Manhattan, and Youth and
Other Poems; also five song-cycles in collaboration with
two composers.

Mr. Richard Aldington is a young English poet, one
of the “Imagistes,” a group of ardent Hellenists who are
pursuing interesting experiments in vers libre; trying to
attain in English certain subtleties of cadence of the kind
which Mallarmé and his followers have studied in French.
Mr. Aldington has published little as yet, and nothing
in America.

Mrs. Van Rensselaer, the well-known writer on art,
began comparatively late to publish verse in the magazines.
Her volume, Poems (Macmillan), was issued in
1910.

Miss Long and Miss Widdemer are young Americans,
some of whose poems have appeared in various magazines.

The last issue of Poetry accredited Mr. Ezra Pound’s
Provenca to the Houghton-Mifflin Co. This was an error;
Small, Maynard & Co. are Mr. Pound’s American publishers.
[Pg 66]

BOOKS RECEIVED

[Pg 67]

	Vol. I No. 3
DECEMBER, 1912
————

[Pg 68]

[Pg 69]

[Pg 70]

[Pg 71]

[Pg 75]

[Pg 76]

[Pg 77]

[Pg 78]

[Pg 80]

[Pg 81]

[Pg 82]

[Pg 83]

[Pg 84]

POEMS

I

Thou hast made me known to
friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not
my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a
brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I
have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there
abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.

Through birth and death, in this world or in
others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one
companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart
with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows
thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh,
grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss
of the touch of the One in the play of the many.

II

No more noisy, loud words from me, such is my
master’s will. Henceforth I deal in whispers. The speech
of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song.

Men hasten to the King’s market. All the buyers
and sellers are there. But I have my untimely leave in
the middle of the day, in the thick of work.

Let then the flowers come out in my garden, though
it is not their time, and let the midday bees strike up
their lazy hum.
[Pg 85]

Full many an hour have I spent in the strife of the
good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate
of the empty days to draw my heart on to him,
and I know not why is this sudden call to what useless
inconsequence!

III

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind
was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty
and the flower remained unheeded.

Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I
started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a
strange smell in the south wind.

That vague fragrance made my heart ache with
longing, and it seemed to me that it was the eager breath
of the summer seeking for its completion.

I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine,
and this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth
of my own heart.

IV

By all means they try to hold me secure who
love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love, which
is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free. Lest I
forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But
day passes by after day and thou are not seen.

If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in
my heart—thy love for me still waits for my love.
[Pg 86]

V

I was not aware of the moment when I first
crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that
made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in
the forest at midnight? When in the morning I looked
upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger
in this world, that the inscrutable without name and
form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own
mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will
appear as ever known to me. And because I love this
life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries
out when from the right breast the mother takes it away
to find in the very next moment its consolation in the
left one.

VI

Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well. Oh,
thou beautiful, there in the nest it is thy love that encloses
the soul with colours and sounds and odours.
There comes the morning with the golden basket in her
right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to
crown the earth. And there comes the evening over the
lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless
paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden
pitcher from the western ocean of rest.

But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul
to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance.
There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never
never a word.

Rabindranath Tagore

[Pg 87]

EDITORIAL COMMENT

A PERFECT RETURN

I t is curious that the influence of Poe upon
Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and
through them upon English poets, and then
through these last upon Americans, comes
back to us in this round-about and indirect
way. We have here an instance of what Whitman calls
a “perfect return.” We have denied Poe, we do not
give him his full meed of appreciation even today, and
yet we accept him through the disciples who have followed
or have assimilated his tradition. And now that
young Englishmen are beginning to feel the influence of
Whitman upon French poetry, it may be that he too,
through the imitation of vers libre in America, will begin
to experience a “perfect return.”

Must we always accept American genius in this
round-about fashion? Have we no true perspective
that we applaud mediocrity at home, and look abroad
for genius, only to find that it is of American origin?

This bit of marginalia, extracted from a note-book
of 1909, was relieved of the necessity of further elaboration
by supplementary evidence received in one day from
two correspondents. One, a brief sentence from Mr.
Allen Upward: “It is much to be wished that America
should learn to honor her sons without waiting for the
literary cliques of London.”

[Pg 88]

The other, the following “news note” from Mr. Paul
Scott Mowrer in Paris. The date of Léon Bazalgette’s
translation, however, is hardly so epochal as it would
seem, since Whitman has been known for many years in
France, having been partly translated during the nineties.

Mr. Mowrer writes:

“It is significant of American tardiness in the development
of a national literary tradition that the name of
Walt Whitman is today a greater influence with the
young writers of the continent than with our own. Not
since France discovered Poe has literary Europe been so
moved by anything American. The suggestion has
even been made that ‘Whitmanism’ is rapidly to supersede
‘Nietzscheism’ as the dominant factor in modern
thought. Léon Bazalgette translated Leaves of Grass
into French in 1908. A school of followers of the Whitman
philosophy and style was an almost immediate consequence.
Such of the leading reviews as sympathize
at all with the strong ‘young’ movement to break the
shackles of classicism which have so long bound French
prosody to the heroic couplet, the sonnet, and the alexandrine,
are publishing not only articles on ‘Whitmanism’
as a movement, but numbers of poems in the new
flexible chanting rhythms. In this regard La Nouvelle
Revue Francaise, La Renaissance Contemporaine, and
L’Effort Libre have been preëminently hospitable.

[Pg 89]

“The new poems are not so much imitations of Whitman
as inspirations from him. Those who have achieved
most success in the mode thus far are perhaps Georges
Duhamel, a leader of the ‘Jeunes,’ whose plays are at
present attracting national notice; André Spire, who
writes with something of the apostolic fervor of his
Jewish ancestry; Henri Franck, who died recently,
shortly after the publication of his volume, La Danse
Devant l’Arche; Charles Vildrac, with Le Livre d’Amour;
Philéas Lebesgue, the appearance in collected form of
whose Les Servitudes is awaited with keen interest; and
finally, Jean Richard Bloch, editor of L’Effort Libre,
whose prose, for example in his book of tales entitled
Levy, is said to be directly rooted in Whitmanism.

“In Germany, too, the rolling intonations of the
singer of democracy have awakened echoes. The
Moderne Weltdichtung has announced itself, with Whitman
as guide, and such apostles as Wilhelm Schmidtbonn,
in Lobegesang des Lebens, and Ernst Lissauer in Der
Acker and Der Strom.

[Pg 90]

“What is it about Whitman that Europe finds so
inspiriting? First, his acceptance of the universe as he
found it, his magnificently shouted comradeship with all
nature and all men. Such a doctrine makes an instant
though hardly logical appeal in nations where socialism
is the political order of the day. And next, his disregard
of literary tradition. Out of books more books, and out
of them still more, with the fecundity of generations.
But in this process of literary propagation thought,
unfortunately, instead of arising like a child ever fresh
and vigorous as in the beginning, grows more and more
attenuated, paler, more sickly. The acclaim of Whitman
is nothing less than the inevitable revolt against the
modern flood of book-inspired books. Write from
nature directly, from the people directly, from the
political meeting, and the hayfield, and the factory—that
is what the august American seems to his young
disciples across the seas to be crying to them.

“Perhaps it is because America already holds as
commonplaces these fundamentals seeming so new to
Europe that the Whitman schools have sprung up
stronger on the eastern side of the Atlantic than on the
western.”

It is not that America holds as commonplaces the
fundamentals expressed in Whitman that there have
been more followers of the Whitman method in Europe
than in America, but that American poets, approaching
poetry usually through terms of feeling, and apparently
loath to apply an intellectual whip to themselves or
others, have made no definite analysis of the rhythmic
units of Whitman. We have been content to accept
the English conception of the “barbaric yawp” of Whitman.
The curious mingling of the concrete and the
spiritual, which is what certain modern painters, perhaps
under the Whitman suggestion, are trying to achieve,
was so novel as to be disconcerting, and the vehicle so
[Pg 91]
original as to appear uncouth—uncadenced, unmusical.
The hide-bound, antiquated conception of English
prosody is responsible for a great deal of dead timber.
It is a significant fact that the English first accepted the
spirit of Whitman, the French his method. The rhythmic
measure of Whitman has yet to be correctly estimated
by English and American poets. It has been sifted and
weighed by the French poets, and though Whitman’s
influence upon modern French poetry has been questioned
by English critics, the connection between his varied
rhythmic units and modern vers libre is too obvious to
be discounted. There may be an innate necessity sufficient
to cause a breaking-up of forms in a poetic language,
but there is no reason to believe that Paris, the great
clearing-house of all the arts, would not be quick to adopt
a suggestion from without. English poets, certainly,
have not been loath to accept suggestions from Paris.

At any rate this international acceptance of the two
greatest American poets, and the realization of their
international influence upon us, may awaken us to a
new sense of responsibility. It would be a valuable
lesson, if only we could learn to turn the international
eye, in private, upon ourselves. If the American poet
can learn to be less parochial, to apply the intellectual
whip, to visualize his art, to separate it and see it apart
from himself; we may learn then to appreciate the great
poet when he is “in our midst.” and not wait for the
approval of English or French critics.

A. C. H.

[Pg 92]

TAGORE’S POEMS

The appearance of the poems of Rabindranath Tagore,
translated by himself from Bengali into English, is an
event in the history of English poetry and of world
poetry. I do not use these terms with the looseness of
contemporary journalism. Questions of poetic art are
serious, not to be touched upon lightly or in a spirit of
bravura.

Bengal is a nation of fifty million people. The great
age of Bengali literature is this age in which we live.
And the first Bengali whom I heard singing the lyrics
of Tagore said, as simply as one would say it is four
o’clock, “Yes, we speak of it as the Age of Rabindranath.”

The six poems now published were chosen from a
hundred lyrics about to appear in book form. They might
just as well have been any other six, for they do not
represent a summit of attainment but an average.

These poems are cast, in the original, in metres
perhaps the most finished and most subtle of any known
to us. If you refine the art of the troubadours, combine
it with that of the Pleiade, and add to that the sound-unit
principle of the most advanced artists in vers libre,
you would get something like the system of Bengali
verse. The sound of it when spoken is rather like good
Greek, for Bengali is daughter of Sanscrit, which is a
kind of uncle or elder brother of the Homeric idiom.

[Pg 93]

All this series of a hundred poems are made to music,
for “Mr.” Tagore is not only the great poet of Bengal,
he is also their great musician. He teaches his songs,
and they are sung throughout Bengal more or less as
the troubadours’ songs were sung through Europe in
the twelfth century.

And we feel here in London, I think, much as the
people of Petrarch’s time must have felt about the
mysterious lost language, the Greek that was just being
restored to Europe after centuries of deprivation. That
Greek was the lamp of our renaissance and its perfections
have been the goal of our endeavor ever since.

I speak with all seriousness when I say that this
beginning of our more intimate intercourse with Bengal
is the opening of another period. For one thing the
content of this first brief series of poems will destroy
the popular conception of Buddhism, for we in the
Occident are apt to regard it as a religion negative and
anti-Christian.

The Greek gave us humanism; a belief in mens sana
in corpore sano, a belief in proportion and balance. The
Greek shows us man as the sport of the gods; the sworn
foe of fate and the natural forces. The Bengali brings
to us the pledge of a calm which we need overmuch in
an age of steel and mechanics. It brings a quiet proclamation
of the fellowship between man and the gods;
between man and nature.

[Pg 94]

It is all very well to object that this is not the first
time we have had this fellowship proclaimed, but in the
arts alone can we find the inner heart of a people. There
is a deeper calm and a deeper conviction in this eastern
expression than we have yet attained. It is by the arts
alone that one people learns to meet another far distant
people in friendship and respect.

I speak with all gravity when I say that world-fellowship
is nearer for the visit of Rabindranath Tagore
to London.

Ezra Pound

REVIEWS

The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson (John Lane.)

This English poet, whose singing ceased a year ago,
had a real lyric gift, though a very slight one. The
present volume is a collection of all her poems, from the
first girlish sheaf Tares, to The Lamp and the Lute, which
she was preparing for publication when she died.

Through this whole life-record her poetry ripples
along as smoothly and delicately as a meadow rill,
with never a pause nor a flurry nor a thrill. She sings
prettily of everyone, from the Last Fairy to William
Ernest Henley, and of everything, from Death and Justice
to the Orchard of the Moon, but she has nothing arresting
or important to say of any of these subjects, and no
keen magic of phrase to give her warbling that intense
vitality which would win for her the undying fame
prophesied by her loyal husband in his preface.

[Pg 95]

Nevertheless, her feeling is genuine, her touch light,
and her tune a quiet monotone of gentle soothing music
which has a certain soft appeal. Perhaps the secret of
it is the fine quality of soul which breathes through these
numerous lyrics, a soul too reserved to tell its whole
story, and too preoccupied with the little things around
and within her to pay much attention to the thinking,
fighting, ever-moving world without.

A big-spirited, vital, headlong narrative poem is
The Adventures of Young Maverick, by Hervey White,
who runs a printing press at Woodstock, N. Y., and
bravely publishes The Wild Hawk, his own little magazine.
The poem has as many moods as Don Juan, which is
plainly, though not tyrannically, its model.

The poem is long for these days—five cantos and
nearly six hundred Spenserian stanzas. Yet the most
casual reader, one would think, could scarcely find it
tedious, even though the satirical passages run heavily
at times. The hero is a colt of lofty Arabian lineage,
and the poem becomes eloquently pictorial in setting
forth his beauty:

[Pg 96]

The spirit of the West is in this poem, its freedom,
spaciousness, strong sunshine; also its careless good
humor and half sardonic fun. The race between the
horse and the Mexican boy is as swift, vivid and rhythmical
as a mountain stream; and the Mexican family,
even to the fat old Gregorio, are characterized to the
life, with a sympathy only too rare among writers of the
Anglo-Saxon race.

Certain other characterizations are equally incisive,
this for example:

Mr. White is so profoundly a democrat, and so wholeheartedly
a poet of the broad, level average American
people, that both social and artistic theories sit very
lightly upon him. He achieves beauty as by chance
now and then, because he can not help it, but always he
achieves a warm vitality, the persuasive illusion of life.

The Iscariot, by Eden Phillpotts (John Lane), is the
ingenious effort of a theorist in human nature to unroll
the convolutions of the immortal traitor’s soul. And
it is as ineffectual as any such effort must be to remould
characters long fixed in literary or historic tradition.
In the art of the world Judas is Judas; anyone who tries
to make him over into a pattern of misguided loyalty
has his labor for his pains.

The blank verse in which the monologue is uttered
is accurately measured and sufficiently sonorous.

H. M.

[Pg 97]

Interpretations: A Book of First Poems, by Zoë Akins (Mitchell Kennerley).

The poems in this volume are creditable in texture,
revealing a conscious sense of artistic workmanship which
it is a pleasure to find in a book of first poems by a young
American. A certain rhythmic monotony may be mentioned
as an impression gained from a consecutive reading,
and a prevailing twilight mood, united, in the longer
poems, with a vein of the emotionally feminine.

Two short lyrics, however, I Am the Wind and The
Tragedienne, stand apart in isolated perfection, even as
the two Greek columns in the ruined theater at Arles;
an impression recalled by the opening stanza of The
Tragedienne:

This is the first of the monthly volumes of poetry to
be issued by Mr. Kennerley. It awakens pleasant
anticipation of those to follow.

Lyrical Poems, By Lucy Lyttelton. (Thomas B. Mosher.)

The twilight mood also prevails in the poems of
Lucy Lyttelton, although the crest of a fine modern
impulse may be traced in A Vision, The Japanese Widow,
The Black Madonna, and A Song of Revolution.

[Pg 98]

These poems unite delicacy and strength. They
convince us of sincerity and intensity of vision.

A. C. H.

[Pg 99]

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

It is hardly necessary to introduce to the lovers of
lyric and dramatic verse Mr. William Butler Yeats, who
honors the Christmas number of Poetry by his presence.
A score or more of years have passed since his voice,
perfect in quality, began to speak and sing in high loyalty
to the beauty of poetic art, especially the ancient poetic
art of his own Irish people. His influence, reinforced
by the prompt allegiance of Lady Gregory, Mr. Douglass
Hyde, the late J. M. Synge, and many other Irish men
and women of letters, has sufficed to lift the beautiful
old Gaelic literature out of the obscurity of merely local
recognition into a position of international importance.
This fact alone is a sufficient acknowledgment of Mr.
Yeats’ genius, and of the enthusiasm which his leadership
has inspired among the thinkers and singers of his race.

Mr. George Sterling, of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California,
is well known to American readers of poetry through his
two books of verse, Wine of Wizardry and The House of
Orchids.

Mr. Clark Ashton Smith, also of California, is a
youth whose talent has been acclaimed quite recently
by a few newspapers of his own state, and recognized by
one or two eastern publications.

[Pg 100]

Mr. John Reed, of New York, and Alice Corbin, the
wife of William P. Henderson, the Chicago painter, are
Americans. The latter has contributed verse and prose
to various magazines. The former is a young journalist,
born in 1887, who has published little verse as yet.

Rabindranath Tagore, the poet of Bengal, is sufficiently
introduced by Mr. Pound’s article.

BOOKS RECEIVED

[Pg 101]

	Vol. I No. 4
JANUARY, 1913
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[Pg 102]

[Pg 104]

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[Pg 114]

[Pg 117]

[Pg 118]

VERSES, TRANSLATIONS, AND REFLECTIONS FROM
“The Anthology“

[Pg 121]

[Pg 123]

EDITORIAL COMMENT

STATUS RERUM

London, December 10, 1912

The state of things here in London is, as I
see it, as follows:

I find Mr. Yeats the only poet worthy
of serious study. Mr. Yeats’ work is already
a recognized classic and is part of the
required reading in the Sorbonne. There is no need
of proclaiming him to the American public.

As to his English contemporaries, they are food,
sometimes very good food, for anthologies. There are
a number of men who have written a poem, or several
poems, worth knowing and remembering, but they do
not much concern the young artist studying the art of
poetry.

The important work of the last twenty-five years
has been done in Paris. This work is little likely to gain
a large audience in either America or England, because
of its tone and content. There has been no “man with
a message,” but the work has been excellent and the
method worthy of our emulation. No other body of
poets having so little necessity to speak could have
spoken so well as these modern Parisians and Flemings.

There has been some imitation here of their manner
and content. Any donkey can imitate a man’s manner.
There has been little serious consideration of their
method. It requires an artist to analyze and apply a
method.

[Pg 124]

Among the men of thirty here, Padraic Colum is the
one whom we call most certainly a poet, albeit he has
written very little verse—and but a small part of that is
worthy of notice. He is fairly unconscious of such
words as “aesthetics,” “technique” and “method.”
He is at his best in Garadh, a translation from the
Gaelic, beginning:

and in A Drover. He is bad whenever he shows a trace
of reading. I quote the opening of A Drover, as I
think it shows “all Colum” better than any passage he
has written. I think no English-speaking writer now
living has had the luck to get so much of himself into
twelve lines.

[Pg 125]

I would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox
Hueffer than with any man in London. Mr. Hueffer’s
beliefs about the art may be best explained by saying
that they are in diametric opposition to those of Mr.
Yeats.

Mr. Yeats has been subjective; believes in the glamour
and associations which hang near the words. “Works of
art beget works of art.” He has much in common with
the French symbolists. Mr. Hueffer believes in an exact
rendering of things. He would strip words of all “association”
for the sake of getting a precise meaning. He
professes to prefer prose to verse. You would find his
origins in Gautier or in Flaubert. He is objective. This
school tends to lapse into description. The other tends
to lapse into sentiment.

Mr. Yeats’ method is, to my way of thinking, very
dangerous, for although he is the greatest of living poets
who use English, and though he has sung some of the
moods of life immortally, his art has not broadened
much in scope during the past decade. His gifts to
English art are mostly negative; i. e., he has stripped
English poetry of many of its faults. His “followers”
have come to nothing. Neither Synge, Lady Gregory
nor Colum can be called his followers, though he had
much to do with bringing them forth, yet nearly every
man who writes English verse seriously is in some way
indebted to him.

[Pg 126]

Mr. Hueffer has rarely “come off.” His touch is so
light and his attitude so easy that there seems little
likelihood of his ever being taken seriously by anyone
save a few specialists and a few of his intimates. His
last leaflet, High Germany, contains, however, three
poems from which one may learn his quality. They are
not Victorian. I do not expect many people to understand
why I praise them. They are The Starling, In the
Little Old Market-Place and To All the Dead.

The youngest school here that has the nerve to call
itself a school is that of the Imagistes. To belong to
a school does not in the least mean that one writes poetry
to a theory. One writes poetry when, where, because,
and as one feels like writing it. A school exists when
two or three young men agree, more or less, to call certain
things good; when they prefer such of their verses as have
certain qualities to such of their verses as do not have them.

Space forbids me to set forth the program of the
Imagistes at length, but one of their watchwords is
Precision, and they are in opposition to the numerous
and unassembled writers who busy themselves with dull
and interminable effusions, and who seem to think that
a man can write a good long poem before he learns to
write a good short one, or even before he learns to produce
a good single line.

Among the very young men, there seems to be a
gleam of hope in the work of Richard Aldington, but
it is too early to make predictions.

[Pg 127]

There are a number of men whose names are too
well known for it to seem necessary to tell them over.
America has already found their work in volumes or
anthologies. Hardy, Kipling, Maurice Hewlett, Binyon,
Robert Bridges, Sturge Moore, Henry Newbolt, McKail,
Masefield, who has had the latest cry; Abercrombie,
with passionate defenders, and Rupert Brooke, recently
come down from Cambridge.

There are men also, who are little known to the general
public, but who contribute liberally to the “charm” or
the “atmosphere” of London: Wilfred Scawen Blunt,
the grandest of old men, the last of the great Victorians;
great by reason of his double sonnet, beginning—

Ernest Rhys, weary with much editing and hack work,
to whom we owe gold digged in Wales, translations,
transcripts, and poems of his own, among them the fine
one to Dagonet; Victor Plarr, one of the “old” Rhymers’
Club, a friend of Dowson and of Lionel Johnson. His
volume, In The Dorian Mood, has been half forgotten,
but not his verses Epitaphium Citharistriae. One would
also name the Provost of Oriel, not for original work,
but for his very beautiful translations from Dante.

In fact one might name nearly a hundred writers
who have given pleasure with this or that matter in
rhyme. But it is one thing to take pleasure in a man’s
work and another to respect him as a great artist.

Ezra Pound

[Pg 128]

REVIEWS

The Lyric Year, Mr. Kennerley’s new annual, contains
among its hundred contributions nearly a score of
live poems, among which a few excite the kind of keen
emotion which only art of real distinction can arouse.

Among the live poems the present reviewer would
count none of the prize-winners, not even Mr. Sterling’s,
the best of the three, whose rather stiff formalities in
praise of Browning are, however, lit now and then by
shining lines, as—

The other two prize-poems must have been measured
by some academic foot-rule dug up from the eighteenth
century. Orrick Johns’ Second Avenue is a Grays Elegy
essay of prosy moralizing, without a finely poetic line
in it, or any originality of meaning or cadence. And the
second prize went to an ode still more hopelessly academic.
Indeed, To a Thrush, by Thomas Augustine Daly,
is one of the most stilted poems in the volume, a far-away
echo of echoes, full of the approved “poetic” words—throstle,
pregnant, vernal, cerulean, teen,
chrysmal, even paraclete—and quite guiltless
of inspiration.

[Pg 129]

But one need not linger with these. As we face the
other way one poem outranks the rest and ennobles the
book. This is The Renascence, said to be by Edna St.
Vincent Millay, who, according to the editor, is only
twenty years old. This poem is the daring flight of a
wide-winged imagination, and the art of it, though not faultless,
is strong enough to carry us through keen emotions of
joy and agony to a climax of spiritual serenity. Though
marred by the last twelve lines, which should be struck
out for stating the thesis too explicitly, this poem arouses
high hopes of its youthful author.

Among the other live poems—trees, saplings or flowers—are
various species. Kisa-Gotami, by Arthur Davison
Ficke, tells its familiar story of the Buddha in stately
cadences which sustain the beauty of the tale. Jetsam, a
“Titanic” elegy by Herman Montagu Donner, carries the
dread and dangerous subject without violating its terrors
and sanctities with false sentiment or light rhythm.
Ridgeley Torrence’s Ritual for a Funeral is less sure of
its ground, sometimes escaping into vapors, but on the
whole noble in feeling and flute-like in cadence. Mrs.
Conkling’s bird ode has now and then an airy delicacy,
and Edith Wyatt’s City Swallow gives the emotion of
flight above the roofs and smoke of a modern town.

[Pg 130]

Of the shorter poems who could ignore Harry Kemp’s
noble lyric dialogue, I Sing the Battle; The Forgotten
Soul by Margaret Widdemer, Selma, by Willard H.
Wright; Comrades by Fannie Stearns Davis, or Nicholas
Vachel Lindsay’s tribute to O. Henry, a more vital elegy
than Mr. Sterling’s? These are all simple and
sincere—straight modern talk which rises into song without the aid
of worn-out phrases. Paternity, by William Rose Benét,
To My Vagrant Love, by Elouise Briton, and Dedication,
by Pauline Florence Brower, are delicate expressions of
intimate emotion; and Martin, by Joyce Kilmer, touches
with grace a lighter subject.

To have gathered such as these together is perhaps
enough, but more may be reasonably demanded. As a
whole the collection, like the prizes, is too academic;
Georgian and Victorian standards are too much in evidence.
The ambition of The Lyric Year is to be “an
annual Salon of American poetry;” to this end poets and
their publishers are invited to contribute gratis the best
poems of the year, without hope of reward other than
the three prizes. That so many responded to the call,
freely submitting their works to anonymous judges,
shows how eager is the hitherto unfriended American muse
to seize any helping hand.

However, if this annual is to speak with any authority
as a Salon, it should take a few lessons from art exhibitions.
Mr. Earle’s position as donor, editor and judge, is as if Mr.
Carnegie should act as hanging committee at the Pittsburg
show, and help select the prize-winners. And
Messrs. Earle, Braithwaite and Wheeler, this year’s
jury of awards, are not, even though all have written verse,
poets of recognized distinction in the sense that Messrs.
Chase, Alexander, Hassam, Duveneck, and other jurymen
in our various American Salons, are distinguished painters.

[Pg 131]

In these facts lie the present weaknesses of The Lyric
Year. However, the remedy for them is easy and may be
applied in future issues. Meantime the venture is to be
welcomed; at last someone, somewhere, is trying to do
something for the encouragement of the art in America.
Poetry, which is embarked in the same adventure, rejoices
in companionship.

H. M.

Already many books of verses come to us, of which a
few are poetry. Sometimes the poetry is an aspiration
rather than an achievement; but in spite of crude materials
and imperfect artistry one may feel the beat of wings and
hear the song. Again one searches in vain for the magic
touch, even though the author has interesting things to
say in creditable and more or less persuasive rhymed
eloquence.

Of recent arrivals Mr. John Hall Wheelock has the
most searching vision and appealing voice. In The
Human Fantasy (Sherman, French & Co.) his subject
is New York, typified in the pathetic little love-affair
of two young starvelings, which takes its course through a
stirring, exacting milieu to a renunciation that leaves the
essential sanctities intact. The poet looks through the
slang and shoddy of the lovers, and the dust and glare
of the city, to the divine power of passion in both. In
The Beloved Adventure the emotion is less poignant; or,
rather, the poet has included many indifferent pieces which
obscure the quality of finer lyrics. More rigorous technique
[Pg 132]
and resolute use of the waste-basket would make more
apparent the fact that we have here a true poet, one with
a singing voice, and a heart deeply moved by essential
spiritual beauty in the common manifestations of human
character. At his best he writes with immense concentration
and unflagging vigor; and his hearty young appetite
for life in all its manifestations helps him to transmute
the repellant discords of the modern town into harmony.
The fantasy of Love in a City is a “true thing” and a vital.

Mr. Hermann Hagedorn is also a true poet, capable of
lyric rapture, but sometimes, when he seems least aware,
his muse escapes him. The Infidel, the initial poem of
his Poems and Ballads (Houghton Mifflin Co.), recalls his
Woman of Corinth, and others in this book remind one of
this and of his Harvard class poem, The Troop of the Guard,
in that the words do not, like colored sands, dance inevitably
into the absolute shape determined by the wizardry
of sound. He is still somewhat hampered by the New
England manner, a trend toward an external formalism
not dependent on interior necessity. This influence
makes for academic and lifeless work, and it must be
deeply rooted since it casts its chill also over the Boston
school of painters.

But now and then Mr. Hagedorn frees himself; perhaps
in the end he may escape altogether. In such poems as
Song, Doors, Broadway, Discovery,
The Wood-Gatherer, The Crier in the Night and
A Chant on the Terrible Highway,
we feel that he begins to speak for himself, to sing with
his own voice. Such poems are a challenging note that
should arrest the attention of all seekers after sincere
poetic expression.

[Pg 133]

Mr. Percy MacKaye, in Uriel and Other Poems
(Houghton Mifflin Co.), shows also the Boston influence,
but perhaps it is difficult to escape the academic note in
such poems for occasions as these. With fluent eloquence
and a ready command of verse forms he celebrates dead
poets, addresses noted living persons, and contributes
to a number of ceremonial observances. The poems in
which he is most freely lyric are perhaps In the Bohemian
Redwoods and To the Fire-Bringer, the shorter of his
elegies in honor of Moody, his friend.

In two dramatic poems, The Tragedy of Etarre, by Rhys
Carpenter (Sturgis & Walton Co.), and Gabriel, a Pageant
of Vigil, by Mrs. Isabelle Howe Fiske (Mosher), the
academic note is confidently insisted on. The former
shows the more promise of ultimate freedom. It is an
Arthurian venture of which the prologue is the strongest
part. In firm-knit iambics Mr. Carpenter strikes out
many effective lines and telling situations. Indeed, they
almost prompt the profane suggestion that, simplified
and compressed, they might yield a psychological libretto
for some “advanced” composer.

Mrs. Fiske’s venture is toward heaven itself; but her
numerous archangels are of the earth earthy.

[Pg 134]

In The Unconquered Air and Other Poems (Houghton
Mifflin Co.), Mrs. Florence Earle Coates shows not inspiration
but wide and humane sympathies. Her verse is
typical of much which has enough popular appeal and
educative value to be printed extensively in the magazines;
verse in which subjects of modern interest and human sentiment
are expressed in the kind of rhymed eloquence which
passes for poetry with the great majority.

These poets may claim the justification
of illustrious precedent. The typical poem of this class in America,
the most famous verse rhapsody which stops short of
lyric rapture, is Lowell’s Commemoration Ode.

NOTES

Our poets this month play divers instruments. The
audience may listen to H. D.’s flute, the ‘cello of
Mr. Rhys, the big bass drum of Mr. Lindsay, and so
on through the orchestra, fitting each poet to his special
strain. Some of these performers are well known, others
perhaps will be.

Mr. Ernest Rhys is of Welsh descent. In 1888-9 he
lectured in America, and afterward returned to London,
where he has published A London Rose, Arthurian plays
and poems, and Welsh ballads, and edited Everyman’s
Library.

Mr. Madison Cawein, the well-known Kentucky poet
resident in Louisville, scarcely needs an introductory
word. His is landscape poetry chiefly, but sometimes, as
in Wordsworth, figures blend with the scene and become
a part of nature. A volume of his own selections from his
various books has recently been published by The MacMillan
Company.

[Pg 135]

Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay is the vagabond poet who
loves to tramp through untravelled country districts without
a cent in his pocket, exchanging “rhymes for bread”
at farmers’ hearths. The magazines have published engaging
articles by him, but in verse he has been usually
his own publisher as yet.

“H. D., Imagiste,” is an American lady resident
abroad, whose identity is unknown to the editor. Her
sketches from the Greek are not offered as exact translations,
or as in any sense finalities, but as experiments in
delicate and elusive cadences, which attain sometimes a
haunting beauty.

Mr. Kendall Banning is an editor and writer of songs.
“The Love Songs of the Open Road,” with music by
Lena Branscord, will soon be published by Arthur
Schmidt of Boston.

Mrs. Anita Fitch of New York has contributed poems
to various magazines.

The February number of Poetry will be devoted
to the work of two poets, Messrs. Arthur Davison Ficke
and Witter Bynner.

[Pg 136]

BOOKS RECEIVED

[Pg 137]

	Vol. I No. 5
FEBRUARY, 1913
————

POEMS

BY

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

[Pg 147]

[Pg 150]

POEMS

BY

WITTER BYNNER

APOLLO TROUBADOUR

When a wandering Italian
Yesterday at noon
Played upon his hurdy-gurdy
Suddenly a tune,
There was magic in my ear-drums:
Like a baby’s cup and spoon
Tinkling time for many sleigh-bells,
Many no-school, rainy-day-bells,
Cow-bells, frog-bells, run-away-bells,
Mingling with an ocean medley
As of elemental people
More emotional than wordy,—
Mermaids laughing off their tantrums,
Mermen singing loud and sturdy,—
Silver scales and fluting shells,
Popping weeds and gurgles deadly,
Coral chime from coral steeple,
Intermittent deep-sea bells
Ringing over floating knuckles,
Buried gold and swords and buckles,
And a thousand bubbling chuckles,
[Pg 151]
Yesterday at noon,—
Such a melody as star-fish,
And all fish that really are fish,
In a gay, remote battalion
Play at midnight to the moon!

Could any playmate on our planet,
Hid in a house of earth’s own granite,
Be so devoid of primal fire
That a wind from this wild crated lyre
Should find no spark and fan it?
Would any lady half in tears,
Whose fashion, on a recent day
Over the sea, had been to pay
Vociferous gondoliers,
Beg that the din be sent away
And ask a gentleman, gravely treading
As down the aisle at his own wedding,
To toss the foreigner a quarter
Bribing him to leave the street;
That motor-horns and servants’ feet
Familiar might resume, and sweet
To her offended ears,
The money-music of her peers!

[Pg 152]
Apollo listened, took the quarter
With his hat off to the buyer,
Shrugged his shoulder small and sturdy,
Led away his hurdy-gurdy
Street by street, then turned at last
Toward a likelier piece of earth
Where a stream of chatter passed,
Yesterday at noon;
By a school he stopped and played
Suddenly a tune….
What a melody he made!
Made in all those eager faces,
Feet and hands and fingers!
How they gathered, how they stayed
With smiles and quick grimaces,
Little man and little maid!—
How they took their places,
Hopping, skipping, unafraid,
Darting, rioting about,
Squealing, laughing, shouting out!
How, beyond a single doubt,
In my own feet sprang the ardour
(Even now the motion lingers)
To be joining in their paces!
Round and round the handle went,—
Round their hearts went harder;—
Apollo urged the happy rout
And beamed, ten times as well content
With every son and daughter
As though their little hands had lent
The gentleman his quarter.—
(You would not guess—nor I deny—
[Pg 153]
That that same gentleman was I!)
No gentleman may watch a god
With proper happiness therefrom;
So street by street again I trod
The way that we had come.
He had not seen me following
And yet I think he knew;
For still, the less I heard of it,
The more his music grew:
As if he made a bird of it
To sing the distance through….
And, O Apollo, how I thrilled,
You liquid-eyed rapscallion,
With every twig and twist of Spring,
Because your music rose and filled
Each leafy vein with dew,—
With melody of olden sleigh-bells,
Over-the-sea-and-far-away-bells,
And the heart of an Italian,
And the tinkling cup and spoon,—
Such a melody as star-fish,
And all fish that really are fish,
In a gay remote battalion
Play at midnight to the moon!

[Pg 156]

[Pg 158]

[Pg 160]

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS

The Story of a Round House and other Poems,

by John Masefield (Macmillan)

Not long ago I chanced to see upon a
well-known page, reflective and sincere,
these words: “The invisible root out of
which the poetry deepest in and dearest
to humanity grows is Friendship.”

A recent volume may well serve as a distinguished
illustration of the saying’s truth. Few persons, I think,
will read The Story of a Round House and other Poems
without a sense that the invisible root of its deep poetry
is that fine power which Whitman called Friendship, the
genius of sympathetic imagination.

This is the force that knits the sinews of the chief, the
life-size figure of the book. Dauber is the tale of a man
and his work. It is the story of an artist in the making.
The heroic struggles of an English farmer’s son of twenty-one
to become a painter of ships and the ocean, form the
drama of the poem. The scene is a voyage around the
Horn, the ship-board and round-house of a clipper where
Dauber spends cruel, grinding months of effort to become
an able seaman on the road of his further purpose—

Of beating thought into the perfect line.

[Pg 161]

His fall from the yard-arm toward the close of the
conquered horrors of his testing voyage; the catastrophe
of his death after

these make the end of the tragedy.

Tragedy? Yes. But a tragedy of the same temper
as that of the great Dane, where the pursuit of a mortal
soul’s intention is more, far more, than his mortality.
Unseen forever by the world, part of its unheard melodies,
are all the lines and colors of the Dauber’s dreaming.
At Elsinore rules Fortinbras, the foe: the fight is lost;
the fighter has been slain. These are great issues, hard,
unjust and wrong. But the greatest issue of all is that
men should be made of the stuff of magnificence. You
close the poem, you listen to the last speech of its deep
sea-music, thinking: Here is death, the real death we
all must die; here is futility, and who knows what we all
are here for? But here is glory.

Only less powerful than the impression of the strain
of Dauber’s endeavor, is the impression of its loneliness.
The sneers of the reefers, their practical jokes, the dulness,
the arrogance, the smugness and endless misunderstanding,
the meanness of man on the apprentice journey, has
a keener tooth than the storm-wind.

[Pg 162]

The verities of Dauber are built out of veracities.
The reader must face the hardship of labor at sea. He
must face the squalors, the miseries. If he cannot find
poetry in a presentment of the cruel, dizzying reality of
a sailor’s night on a yard-arm in the icy gale off Cape
Horn, then he will not perhaps feel in the poem the uncompromising
raciness inherent in romances that are true.
For the whole manner of this sea-piece is that of bold,
free-hand drawing of things as they are. Its final event
presents a genuinely epic subject from our contemporary
history—the catastrophic character of common labor,
and one of its multitudinous fatalities.

Epic rather than lyric, the verse of Dauber has an
admirable and refreshing variety in its movement. It
speaks the high, wild cry of an eagle:

It speaks thick-crowding discomforts on the mast with a slapping, frozen sail:

Some of the lines, such as—

have the hard ring, the thick-packed consonantal beauty of stirring Greek.

[Pg 163]

Dauber will have value to American poetry-readers
if only from its mere power of revealing that poetry is
not alone the mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells, though
it be that also, but may have music of innumerable kinds.

Biography, the next poem in the book, sings with a
different voice and sees from a different point of view,
the difficulty of re-creating in expression—here expression
through words, not through colors—

Biography, too, rises from the invisible root of friendship
and bears with wonderfully vivid arborescence an appreciative
tale of the fine contribution of different companionships
to a life.

Among the two-score shorter lyrics of the collection are
songs of the sea or of the country-side; chants of coast-town
bells and ports, marine ballads, and love-poems. This
is, however, the loosest entitling of their kinds; nothing
but the work itself in its entirety, can ever tell the actual
subject of any true poem. Of these kinds it is not to the
marine ballads that one turns back again and again, not
to the story of “Spanish Waters” nor to any of the jingling-gold,
the clinking-glass, the treasure-wreck verses of
the book. Their tunes are spirited, but not a tenth as
spirited as those of “The Pirates of Penzance.” Indeed,
to the conventionally villainous among fictive sea-faring
persons of song, Gilbert and Sullivan seem to have done
something that cannot now ever be undone.

[Pg 164]

The poems in the volume one does turn back to again
and again are those with the great singing tones, that
pour forth with originality, with inexpressible free grace
and native power. Again and again you will read A
Creed, C. L. M., Born for Nought Else,
Roadways, Truth, The Wild Duck,
Her Heart, and—

Wonderful, wonderful it is that in the hearing of our
own generation, one great voice after another has called
and sung to the world from the midst of the sea-mists of
England. From the poetry of Swinburne, of Rudyard
Kipling, of John Masefield immortal things still give us
dream.

Among the poems of this new book, more than one
appear as incarnations of the beauty Death can never
take. Of these, perhaps, none is more characteristic of
the poet, nor will any more fittingly evince his volume’s
quality than Truth.

Présences, par P. J. Jouve: Georges Crès, Paris.

I take pleasure in welcoming, in Monsieur Jouve, a
contemporary. He writes the new jargon and I have
not the slightest doubt that he is a poet.

Whatever may be said against automobiles and aeroplanes
and the modernist way of speaking of them, and
however much one may argue that this new sort of work
is mannered, and that its style will pass, still it is indisputable
that the vitality of the time exists in such work.

Here is a book that you can read without being dead
sure of what you will find on the next page, or at the end
of the next couplet. There is no doubt that M. Jouve
sees with his own eyes and feels with his own nerves.
Nothing is more boresome than an author who pretends
to know less about things than he really does know. It
is this silly sort of false naïveté that rots the weaker productions
of Maeterlinck. Thank heaven the advance
guard is in process of escaping it.

[Pg 166]

It is possible that the new style will grow as weak in
the future in the hands of imitators as has, by now, the
Victorian manner, but for the nonce it is refreshing.
Work of this sort can not be produced by the yard in
stolid imitation of dead authors.

I defy anyone to read it without being forced to think,
immediately, about life and the nature of things. I have
perused this volume twice, and I have enjoyed it.

E. P.

THE POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA

The Poetry Society of America, organized in 1910,
was a natural response, perhaps at the time unconscious,
to the reawakened interest in poetry, now so widely apparent.

There seemed no reason why poetry, one of the noblest
of the arts, should not take to itself visible organization
as well as its sister arts of music and painting, since it
was certain that such organization contributed much to
their advancement and appreciation. Poetry alone
remained an isolated art, save through the doubtful value
of coteries dedicated to the study of some particular
poet. In the sense of fellowship, of the creative sympathy
of contact, of the keener appreciation which must
follow the wider knowledge of an art, poetry stood alone,
detached from these avenues open from the beginning to
other arts.
[Pg 167]

The Society was therefore founded, with a charter
membership of about fifty persons, which included many
of the poets doing significant work to-day, together with
critics and representatives of other arts, the purpose
from the outset being to include the appreciators of poetry
as well as its producers. It has grown to nearly two
hundred members, distributed from coast to coast, and
eventually it will probably resolve itself into branch
societies, with the chief organization, as now, in New
York. Such societies should have a wide influence upon
their respective communities in stimulating interest in
the work of living poets, to which the Poetry Society as
an organization is chiefly addressed.

Since the passing of the nineteenth-century poets,
the art of poetry, like the art of painting, has taken on
new forms and become the vehicle of a new message.
The poet of to-day speaks through so different a medium,
his themes are so diverse from those of the elder generation,
that he cannot hope to find his public in their lingering
audience. He must look to his contemporaries, to
those touched by the same issues and responsive to the
same ideals. To aid in creating this atmosphere for the
poet, to be the nucleus of a movement for the wider
knowledge of contemporaneous verse, the Poetry Society
of America took form and in its brief period has, I think,
justified the idea of its promoters.
[Pg 168]

Its meetings are held once a month at the National
Arts Club in New York, with which it is affiliated, and
are given chiefly to the reading and discussion of poetry,
both of recently published volumes and of poems submitted
anonymously. This feature has proved perhaps
the most attractive, and while criticism based upon one
hearing of a poem cannot be taken as authoritative, it is
often constructive and valuable.

The Society is assembling an interesting collection
of books, a twentieth century library of American
poetry. Aside from its own collection, it is taking steps
to promote a wider representation of modern poets in
public libraries.

Jessie B. Rittenhouse.

NOTES

“THAT MASS OF DOLTS”

Mr. Pound’s phrase in his poem To Whistler,
American, has aroused more or less resentment, some of
it quite emphatic. Apparently we of “these states” have
no longing for an Ezekiel; our prophets must give us, not
the bitter medicine which possibly we need, but the
sugar-and-water of compliment which we can always
swallow with a smile.

Perhaps we should examine our consciences a little,
or at least step down from our self-erected pedestals long
enough to listen to this accusation. What has become
of our boasted sense of humor if we cannot let our young
poets rail, or our sense of justice if we cannot cease smiling
and weigh their words? In certain respects we Americans
[Pg 169]
are a “mass of dolts,” and in none more than our huge
stolid, fundamental indifference to our own art. Mr.
Pound is not the first American poet who has stood with
his back to the wall, and struck out blindly with clenched
fists in a fierce impulse to fight. Nor is he the first whom
we, by this same stolid and indifferent rejection, have
forced into exile and rebellion.

After a young poet has applied in vain to the whole
list of American publishers and editors, and learned that
even though he were a genius of the first magnitude they
could not risk money or space on his poetry because the
public would not buy it—after a series of such rebuffs our
young aspirant goes abroad and succeeds in interesting
some London publisher. The English critics, let us say,
praise his book, and echoes of their praises reach our
astonished ears. Thereupon the poet in exile finds that
he has thus gained a public, and editorial suffrages, in
America, and that the most effective way of increasing
that public and those suffrages is, to remain in exile and
guard his foreign reputation.

Meantime it is quite probable that a serious poet will
have grown weary of such open and unashamed colonialism,
that he will prefer to stay among people who are
seriously interested in aesthetics and who know their
own minds. For nothing is so hard to meet as indifference;
blows are easier for a live man to endure than neglect.
The poet who cries out his message against a stone wall
will be silenced in the end, even though he bear a seraph’s
wand and speak with the tongues of angels.
[Pg 170]

One phase of our colonialism in art, the singing of
opera in foreign languages, has been persistently opposed
by Eleanor E. Freer, who has set to music of rare
distinction many of the finest English lyrics, old and
new. She writes:

In the Basilikon Doron, King James I of England writes to his
son: “And I would, also, advise you to write in your own language;
for there is nothing left to be said in Greek and Latin already—and
besides that, it best becometh a King to purify and make famous
his own tongue.” Might we add, it best becometh the kings of art
in America and England to sing their own language and thus aid in the
progress of their national music and poetry?

Messrs. Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner
belong to the younger group of American poets, both
having been born since 1880, the former in Davenport,
Iowa, and the latter in Brooklyn. Both were graduated
from Harvard early in this century, after which Mr. Ficke
was admitted to the bar, and Mr. Bynner became assistant
editor of McClure’s.

Mr. Ficke has published From the Isles, The Happy
Princess, The Earth Passion and The Breaking of Bonds;
also Mr. Faust, a dramatic poem, and a series of poems
called Twelve Japanese Painters, will be published this
year. Mr. Bynner has published An Ode to Harvard and
Other Poems, and An Immigrant. His play, His Father’s
House, was recently produced in California.
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